5 ms·

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort. Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

castis 9y ago
Most of the ones I've seen were learning experiments. A really really good way to understand something is to build it.
nkozyra 9y ago
If you think of an OS as solely something that sits on your desktop, then sure, but this is fairly myopic (and defeatist). There are lots of small, proprietary and often embedded operating systems that rely on the same principles established by present and past OS. Writing operating systems is also a great way/introduction to work on operating systems, and it's a fairly distinct area of development. It's hard to get day-to-day overlap if you're working on things that don't have the constraints and operating system does.
kajecounterhack 9y ago
It's usually a learning project. The same way tons of people implement web servers but ultimately use something out of the box in production. https://github.com/klange/toaruos https://github.com/klange/toaruos << example of a hobby OS taken farther than most I've seen.
xj9 9y ago
ever heard of fun? or learning? not everything needs to have the potential for monetization to be worthwhile; it can just be interesting. this is actually something that has been difficult for me to internalize, but i am much happier for it. no less ambitious, but i've found that there are a lot of nice (pointless) things that contribute to my happiness in addition to success.
infogulch 9y ago
Operating systems' success is fundamentally based on their popularity. Popularity resembles an exponential distribution, therefore there can only be a small number of popular ones with a long long tail of less and less popular ones. Here, popularity is a positive feedback loop, where the more popular it is the more developers target it, and the more it's targeted the more it's developed internally, which makes it better and therefore more popular. That doesn't mean it's useless to develop them. If you set your sights low (playing around, learning, academic) you can still benefit from them without them being a huge success by popularity standards.
skocznymroczny 9y ago
Having no confidence in the project is part of the path to success "I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)"
- Numberwang 9y ago
  Hey, good luck with it! I'm thinking maybe I'm just wired differently. If I have a side project or hobby I still want to feel maybe not success but a sense of completion. An OS project I suspect will always end when you no longer have time for it or are stuck somewhere. I'd be annoyed by that.
  - bradyd 9y ago
    @skocznymroczny was actually quoting a post from Linus Torvalds when he first released Linux.
  - garfij 9y ago
    It might have been helpful for GP to note that the quote comes from Linus Torvalds. He said it while he was first developing Linux
  - AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
    Your reply, while I'm sure it is genuine, couldn't be more on-point by being more wrong. You really don't know, and cannot know, where the next Linux is going to come from. I don't know if this will be it, just by considering probabilities, it probably won't be, but it could. Even at the worst case, the author of a project like this is going to learn A LOT from it, and the people who read through the source code are also going to learn a lot. Writing an OS in a higher-level language absolutely is beneficial to people who want to learn more about how hardware works and interacts with the OS, without needing to delve into something as complex as the Linux/BSD kernels. At a minimum, I think projects like this directly create contributions to other "real" kernels by teaching developers how to do kernel/OS programming.
0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
> Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google? There is as much room as there are people frustrated with the "state of the art." Edit: Have you seen this apple commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8. Yes it is from 1984 and you might think it doesn't apply.
mcbits 9y ago
The reasons aren't so different from the reasons for writing any other software. 1. Even if the project never replaces the other software you use, you gain a better understanding of that other software by solving some of the same problems, making the same mistakes, learning the same lessons. 2. You may have special requirements that don't make sense to add to an existing project aimed at a broader audience. This is where a lot of niche microcontroller OSes come from. 3. You have a crazy idea that would be hard to explore within the architecture of an existing project. If it turns out to be crazy enough to work, then maybe people will do the work to migrate it to the mainstream. 4. Everyone has a little dream that the masses will find great value in their work and flock to it, supplanting the status quo. Like becoming a billionaire, it essentially never happens, but you can't blame people for trying.
- laumars 9y ago
  5. fun. A lot of people -myself included- enjoy solving puzzles for fun. So I often set myself weird or obscure challenges to solve with code.
bitwize 9y ago
Why care for computers when there's a worldwide market for maybe five, tops?
- weberc2 9y ago
  That's not a good comparison. The original quote was made in reference to the total number of machines, not to the number of models.
lkdjalsdjfasdf 9y ago
Lookup Redox

castis 9y ago

Most of the ones I've seen were learning experiments. A really really good way to understand something is to build it.

nkozyra 9y ago

If you think of an OS as solely something that sits on your desktop, then sure, but this is fairly myopic (and defeatist). There are lots of small, proprietary and often embedded operating systems that rely on the same principles established by present and past OS. Writing operating systems is also a great way/introduction to work on operating systems, and it's a fairly distinct area of development. It's hard to get day-to-day overlap if you're working on things that don't have the constraints and operating system does.

kajecounterhack 9y ago

It's usually a learning project. The same way tons of people implement web servers but ultimately use something out of the box in production. https://github.com/klange/toaruos https://github.com/klange/toaruos << example of a hobby OS taken farther than most I've seen.

xj9 9y ago

ever heard of fun? or learning? not everything needs to have the potential for monetization to be worthwhile; it can just be interesting. this is actually something that has been difficult for me to internalize, but i am much happier for it. no less ambitious, but i've found that there are a lot of nice (pointless) things that contribute to my happiness in addition to success.

infogulch 9y ago

Operating systems' success is fundamentally based on their popularity. Popularity resembles an exponential distribution, therefore there can only be a small number of popular ones with a long long tail of less and less popular ones. Here, popularity is a positive feedback loop, where the more popular it is the more developers target it, and the more it's targeted the more it's developed internally, which makes it better and therefore more popular. That doesn't mean it's useless to develop them. If you set your sights low (playing around, learning, academic) you can still benefit from them without them being a huge success by popularity standards.

skocznymroczny 9y ago

Having no confidence in the project is part of the path to success "I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)"

Numberwang 9y ago
Hey, good luck with it! I'm thinking maybe I'm just wired differently. If I have a side project or hobby I still want to feel maybe not success but a sense of completion. An OS project I suspect will always end when you no longer have time for it or are stuck somewhere. I'd be annoyed by that.
- bradyd 9y ago
  @skocznymroczny was actually quoting a post from Linus Torvalds when he first released Linux.
- garfij 9y ago
  It might have been helpful for GP to note that the quote comes from Linus Torvalds. He said it while he was first developing Linux
- AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
  Your reply, while I'm sure it is genuine, couldn't be more on-point by being more wrong. You really don't know, and cannot know, where the next Linux is going to come from. I don't know if this will be it, just by considering probabilities, it probably won't be, but it could. Even at the worst case, the author of a project like this is going to learn A LOT from it, and the people who read through the source code are also going to learn a lot. Writing an OS in a higher-level language absolutely is beneficial to people who want to learn more about how hardware works and interacts with the OS, without needing to delve into something as complex as the Linux/BSD kernels. At a minimum, I think projects like this directly create contributions to other "real" kernels by teaching developers how to do kernel/OS programming.

0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago

> Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google? There is as much room as there are people frustrated with the "state of the art." Edit: Have you seen this apple commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8. Yes it is from 1984 and you might think it doesn't apply.

mcbits 9y ago

The reasons aren't so different from the reasons for writing any other software. 1. Even if the project never replaces the other software you use, you gain a better understanding of that other software by solving some of the same problems, making the same mistakes, learning the same lessons. 2. You may have special requirements that don't make sense to add to an existing project aimed at a broader audience. This is where a lot of niche microcontroller OSes come from. 3. You have a crazy idea that would be hard to explore within the architecture of an existing project. If it turns out to be crazy enough to work, then maybe people will do the work to migrate it to the mainstream. 4. Everyone has a little dream that the masses will find great value in their work and flock to it, supplanting the status quo. Like becoming a billionaire, it essentially never happens, but you can't blame people for trying.

laumars 9y ago
5. fun. A lot of people -myself included- enjoy solving puzzles for fun. So I often set myself weird or obscure challenges to solve with code.

bitwize 9y ago

Why care for computers when there's a worldwide market for maybe five, tops?

weberc2 9y ago
That's not a good comparison. The original quote was made in reference to the total number of machines, not to the number of models.

lkdjalsdjfasdf 9y ago

Lookup Redox